The Way Out Is Through
by Verity
Summary: The characters of Harry Potter face a dystopian future. This was written in 2003, previous to HBP & DH, but I never got around to posting it on FFN.
1. praesumo adjungere te, tandem

**I. **_**praesumo adjungere te, tandem**__ by verity_

They wrote in code. It was the only way they could be sure of - making that connection, without breaking. That was a long time ago.

Hermione died a long time ago. _Was it really so long ago?_ he asks himself, afraid of the answer, as he turns the steering wheel of the car to gently lead up the ramp to the highway. Ten years. They were fifteen. Everything melds together after a while, when he steps back, one fluid slide to the end.

It hadn't been like that, though. He knows there were years when the danger was escapable, everything was conquerable, in the end. It hadn't mattered, though, or - not enough. Even Hermione hadn't seen him, whatever he was, beneath the layers of expectations and ready-made mantles he'd been all too eager to assume.

He didn't call himself Harry anymore. That name belonged to too many faces, all of them impossible to put back on. (A flash - a memory - of mirrors, of faces, when he catches a glimpse of his reflection in the mirrorlike glass of the car window, the silver-black rain pouring past it.)

He remembers Hermione at the oddest times. Like now, in the rain. She had been beautiful, so beautiful that last year, and he had watch how her beauty had been hardening, even then. As she guarded her face, kept her head high. She had always told him, _Harry, you will do it. When the time comes. I know you will._ Her dead words rattle through his head now, little ghosts trespassing there.

So beautiful. He had watched her and Ron once - through a keyhole, as it were - they never knew. Ron, so awkward - and she had led him through the dance, with grace, and held his head to her breast, when they were done. Ron had slept, not seeing her face, the tears in her eyes, in this one unguarded moment.

He had seen them, and knew them for what they were; he had known that grief too, that soft crying after too many dreams were shattered. She had always been kind, so kind.

_I do love him, you know, Harry. We are made of mercury, he and I - perhaps I have the greatest depth, and he the greatest breadth, but we are alike. And he needs me._

There was some illogic there, but even now he can not decipher it - it was so many years ago, so many years. Her bones are in the ground now, her sweet lovely flesh turned to dust. It is raining harder now, sheeting off the car as he drives, heading home. Oh, the bitter irony - he can not bear the train, he truly can not, but it is only when it rains that he allows himself to think of her.

There is a hitch-hiker ahead, and he pulls to the side of the road - anything for a distraction. _How I loved her, how we all loved her... Oh, God -_

The figure in the black rain slicker stumbles toward the car - the seats will get wet, surely, but there is no turning back now.

"Get in," he mutters at the person - a man, he sees now, about his own age, a blond once, though now striped thickly with harsh black die. The contrasts would have interested him more, some other time.

"Thank you," says the blond man roughly. "I've been hours."

He shrugs. "People are like that. I'm going up in Scotland a bit, if that's where you're headed."

"Suits as well as any."

The car is quiet now; the rain has hushed a bit, thin pourings instead of an incessant deluge. And as the rain lessens, the man who had once been called Harry seems to regain himself, if such a thing is possible.

A flash of light; another car hurtling along this desperate stretch around on a hot, humid summer night. The headlamps illuminate the car, its occupants for perhaps a second. Before they can move on, the blond man's wand is at his throat.

The scar. Always the scar.

"Who the _fuck_," Draco hisses, "do you think you are?"

They wrote in code. It was the only way they could be sure of - making that connection, without breaking. That was a long time ago.

"I used to be Potter. Back when you worked both sides."

Ten years. Hermione, who always got the owl, who always gave it a little extra treat even when Ron scorned her for it. He remembers Hermione now, always, forever, especially on this journey home.

There is a farm, perhaps fifteen kilometers along the roadway from here; Remus had owned it, thought it is abandoned now, ten years after Remus's death. Ten years.

Down the exit ramp, down the diplidated road that led to the little farm's turn off. He parks the car in the barn, takes the keys out of the ignition, and sets them on the dashboard.

"I'm sorry," he says, honestly, "If I'm causing any inconvenience to you."

"To me?" Draco's voice is curiously incredulous. "You do realize that the Ministry is offering five thousand galleons for my dead body? War crimes?"

"I left the wizarding world seven years ago."

"Ah."

They stare at each other. He does not know what Draco is seeing, or looking for (the scar?); everything is changed now. Draco is taller, more - Muggle-looking, perhaps, for he could never be mistaken for the Malfoy heir in those damp black trappings.

"I can't believe I never fucked you," says Draco, who has, obviously, changed more than externally.

They wrote in code. It was the only way they could be sure of - making that connection, without breaking. That was a long time ago.

And he is so tired, so broken, now. "I'm going home now," he answers. "If you want - Sirius Black stayed here, once, hiding, and no one would think to look for you."

"I killed her, you know."

"I know." Her closed eyes, her brow bared, every line of her body frozen in sacrifice. A flash of viridian. Lucius - had forced Draco's hand, perhaps. He does not know, will not ask now - it is enough to know that this can be the end of things he never thought finite.

"I am going home," he says.

When he is back on the highway he thinks of how simple everything had seemed when they were young. _The struggle, the fight for survival._ The pure light that war cast on all their deeds. _Harry, you will do it. When the time comes. I know you will._ He had always done it, always done what was expected of him, except in that one moment, where it truly mattered. And what is he now, but putty without form? His shapers long dead. He reviles the masks but is nothing without them.

He remembers Hermione, who in the end he knows was something more lovely than anyone had dreamed. _All the world's a stage, as we are players_. A lesson learned.

_Hermione_, he thinks, _I'm looking forward to joining you, finally._


	2. fragiles

_**fragiles**, by verity_

_Dear Marian_, Ginny begins the letter, _I am sorry to hear of your cold..._

When they are together they are a seamless twist of freckled limbs and silken hair. Sometimes they like to pretend that they are sisters. Ginny's hair is autumn leaves in November; Susan's is a fine liquor gleaming amber in the dim lamplight. Their skin, under the veneer of the sun's kisses, is the thin translucent porcelain of ivory bone china. Susan is all curves, hourglass hips and pendulous breasts; Ginny is sleek sliding lines of classical elegance and sinuous form.

They teach at the new Hogwarts in the daylight hours, the two youngest teachers. Not that their seniors are so very much older. Their shared freckles in hidden hollows of elbows and ankles veiled by billowing robes and an affection of distance. Susan replaces Professor Sprout in the greenhouse, her green thumb calm and efficient where her predecessor's was enthusiastic and eccentric. Ginny takes the place that so many have vacated before; Defense Against the Dark Arts. However, disregarding the ineffable precedent, she stays.

_Dear Marian, the sun is beginning to show herself again, shyly as if she is rather ashamed of her absence during these past stormy days..._ Ginny has a hundred letters here, or perhaps a thousand, or any other number singular enough to be committed to memory, solitary and vast. They always begin the same way, and end the same way as well; _with love, your mother Virginia_.

Susan leaves a cup of tea by her elbow. "Thank you," Ginny murmurs, dipping her pen gingerly into her brass inkwell, listening to the soft teardrops of rain that are beginning to fall outside their window.

Ginny writes a letter every day; she always has, and perhaps always will. Meanwhile, Susan waters the plants lovingly and liesurely, smiling at them with maternal pride. In the daylight hours, they are bold and brilliant with their mother's love as they crawl over mantel and windowsill, and in some cases, walls. _Everyone has their own way of relaxing_, Ginny writies in graceful, damply looping, India-inked script to Marian. _Sometimes I wonder what yours is, and whether you flush with pleasure the way your father does whenever anyone admires your talent._

The plants bow sleepily now, as the sun has completed its setting; Susan lights a fire in the grate, feeding the reluctant flames yesterday's newspaper amidst the firewood, and the rain begins to beat harder against the panes of glass.

_I am sure that you will have wonderful marks in Defense, Marian. I am not so skilled as good at intuiting, but your father has always been the quickest, the swiftest of wizards in a duel. It is innate gift as much as training, you know_.

"Ginny?" Susan's voice is sharp, as deceptive as anything about her is.

"What?" Ginny looks up from her parchment, and the fresh writing begins to dry, its slick glistening absorbing into the page and leaving the words matte and unvarnished. "Is everything all right?"

"There's been a call from the Headmaster. A disturbance in the greenhouses. I'll be back, I hope, before you go to bed-"

"Take an umbrella."

"Of course." Susan comes over to the desk and kisses Ginny softly on the lips before she goes out the door.

It was raining like this the night she lost Marian, Ginny remembers, her quill stilled momentarily. Always the letters. A thousand letters forming a bridge between loss and might-have-beens, and still she pauses and quakes before the truth and desolation, still she hesitates. She had been two months pregnant; no one had known - she was still a _child_, for God's sake, some part of her rages, how could Harry have let her -

But he had. Ginny still feels, seven years later, at twenty-four, the hungry weight of his kisses. It had been perhaps the only time anyone had allowed him to grieve. She had cried out, with the pain and loss of a million things she could not give name to. And she had embraced him gently, as a mother might have, and stroked his hair when he wept. The next morning, he had vanished.

_Dear Marian,_ she always begins, such reliable and innocent words, to anyone who did not know that a single utterance of them was only one helpless stitch in a thousand hungry and gaping wounds- _Dear Harry_, she might as well say, _Allow me to sing this requiem for all I have ever lost_.

Her quill scratchs idly at the parchment now, looping scrawls of ink forming words Ginny will not later recall having written, like those words scrawled on the wall in blood, when she was but a small girl bedazzled and stunned by the wicked of the world.

She is sharpening this quill when Susan comes in, hair damp and face haggard even beneath the forgiving flames of the lamps in their rooms.

"You look like death," says Ginny, not unkindly.

"Harry's dead," Susan answers, her voice rough and uneven. "He hung himself in one of the greenhouses - I didn't see myself - the vines -"

_Sweet lovely vines like the ones on their walls forming a noose around his neck-_

Ginny's hand slips; the knife nicks the tip of her thumb. A scarlet seal on Marian's letter, like the one every word to her dead daughter leaves on her heart.

"Darling-" Susan says, moving out a hand to restrain her, but Ginny is too quick, too many years of practiced and necessary swiftness; she takes the letters from their chest and heaps them upon the fire, watches the crisp parchment burning, the seals melting, garnet wax the color of blood, dripping and smouldering and flaming into ash.

When they are together they are a seamless twist of freckled limbs and silken hair. Sometimes they like to pretend that they are sisters. So like each other in the veil of darkness; their slender frames shudder beneath the weight of the burdens they bear, and tremble in the delirious anticipation of release.


End file.
